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OSHA recently issued Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs in Construction to help industry employers develop proactive programs to keep their workplaces safe. According to the agency, the recommendations may be particularly helpful to small- and medium-sized contractors who lack safety and health specialists on staff.
The National Safety Council (NSC) has released a new report, Making the Case for Contractor Management: Examining the Safety Benefits of 3rd Party Management. The report includes an analysis of hypotheses to assess the safety benefits of contractor safety prequalification programs for participating suppliers, contractors, and vendors. The contractors involved were found to have better […]
Babies born in the year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last set a human health assessment for ammonia are adults now, and it looks like it’s not as risky now than it was back then. What does EPA’s new assessment portend for facilities that use ammonia and the standard set by the Occupational Safety […]
Seventeen states, the District of Columbia, and seven of the nation’s top environmental groups petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to review the legality of the Trump EPA’s decision to withdraw the Obama EPA’s January 2017 determination that the Agency’s 2012 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards for model year (MY) 2022–2025 […]
On July 28, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) called for stakeholder input on updating its mechanical power press standard (29 CFR §1910.217). The OSHA standard, originally issued in 1971, was based on the 1971 edition of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) industry consensus standard for mechanical power presses (ANSI B11.1), which has […]
Training Hispanic workers in safety can present both linguistic and cultural challenges. Here are ideas from the experts on how to do it. “¡Peligroso! ¡No Entrar!” Imagine you’re touring a workplace and notice the sign above on a door. Would you go in? Not if you know, from taking Spanish in school or other experience, […]
Read on for a new baker’s dozen of enviro enforcement actions, from waste issues to pesticide problems to risk management violations. Some of the citations were six figures—clear evidence that complacency toward environmental compliance is tolerated at the peril of organizations in many industries.
On October 6, 2023, the EPA announced two regulations in the continued crusade to phase down the use of super-polluting hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). The first new action is a final rule to accelerate the ongoing transition to more efficient and climate-safe technologies in new refrigeration, heating, and cooling systems and other products by restricting the use […]
Does evidence of a hazard in a workplace or even evidence of an injury provide a reasonable suspicion that an inspection of the workplace would reveal violations of the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act?
President Donald Trump’s proposed 2020 federal budget—a record-high $4.75 trillion—includes a 31% decrease in funding for the EPA, from $8.9 billion in 2019 to $6.1 billion. The proposal would eliminate 37 current EPA programs and four “subprogram projects” and reduce the budgets of 15 major programs. The president also proposes a new $50 million Healthy […]